Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern

This book investigates desert islands in postwar anglophone popular culture, exploring representations in radio, print and screen advertising, magazine cartoons, cinema, video games, and comedy, drama and reality television. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's theory of liquid modernity, desert island texts are analysed in terms of their intersections with repressive and seductive mechanisms of power. Chapters focus on the desert island as: a conflictingly in/coherent space that characterises identity as deferred and structured by choice; a location whose 'remoteness' undermines satirical critiques of communal identity formation; a site whose ambivalent relationship with 'home' and Otherness destabilises patriarchal 'Western' subjectivity; a space bound up with mobility and instantaneity; and an expression of radical individuality and underdetermined identity. The desert island in popular culture is shown to reflect, endorse and critique a profoundly consumerist society that seduces uswith promises of coherence, with the threat of repression looming if we do not conform.

Argues that the desert island is a superlative icon of contemporary existence Examines desert islands in radio, print and screen advertising, magazine cartoons, television comedy and drama, cinema, and video games Analyses popular postwar texts, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's theory of liquid modernity

Autorentext
Barney Samson has lectured in Literature, Film Studies and Communication & Culture at the University of Essex, the University of Roehampton, Middlesex University and City, University of London, UK.

Inhalt

Introduction: What is a desert island?.- 1. Wartime and rationing: desert island escapes and escapades.- 2. After the war: rebuilding society on the desert island.- 3. A decade of decadence: consuming (on) the desert island.- 4. Failing fantasies: The desert island at the turn of the twentieth century.- 5. Swept away: twenty-first century fluid identities and dissolving desert islands.- Afterword.